There was an Old Woman by Howard Engel Read Free Book Online

I said I’d find out a few things.”
    â€œSend him along, dear boy! I’ll tell him all I know. Pass on the torch and all that sort of thing.”
    â€œShe’d be glad to learn the basics from you. I’ll tell her to drop around.” Robin’s face fell at the pronouns.
    â€œWell, you can give her the basic gen, Benny. Let her telephone me if she has any questions. One thing, tell her it’s no bed of roses. The pay is terrible in the beginning and the hours are killing. I sometimes work around the clock just to keep the station on the air.”
    â€œWould things be tamer than that for a news reader?” Robin let his mouth slide into an unpleasant smile.
    â€œOh, she wants to be on camera, does she? Wants to be the face of the ten o’clock news?”
    â€œShe’s a regular Catherine Bracken,” I said. “How much real reporting would Catherine Bracken get into in a week? Or is it all reading what’s been written for her?”
    â€œI’m more Catherine Bracken than she is. I write most of her stuff.”
    â€œSo, she just reads what you give her?” Robin let his eyes roll up towards the ceiling.
    â€œOh, she sometimes gets a bee in her little bonnet. She comes to me with notions she thinks are newsworthy. I tell her to concentrate on pronouncing the Russian names correctly.”
    â€œShe’d work an eight-hour day?” I asked.
    â€œBracken? Eight hours? Are you kidding?” I let my face show that I was ready to be shocked. “She wanders in here in time to do the dinner-time news and she’s out of here before we sign off. She’s finished by half-past ten.How long does it take to remove her make-up? I ask you?”
    â€œDoes she have a journalism degree? Did she ever work for a paper?”
    â€œLook, Benny, I don’t want to give your cousin a false idea of the realities around here.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    â€œThe way to the top in broadcasting, Benny, doesn’t lie through the groves of Academe.”
    â€œAre you saying she will need to have influence?”
    â€œI’m saying she’s got to have more than looks and brains. She’s got to know how to make the most of what she’s got.”
    â€œNot to put it crudely,” I said.
    â€œHell, Benny, she’s your cousin! I’m just reading the writing on the wall.”
    â€œWho’s the main talent scout at CXAN?”
    â€œTry Orv Wishart. Station manager and son-in-law of the owner.”
    â€œI thought CXAN was a company?”
    â€œIt is and the company is the Ravenswood family, as in the Ravenswood Bridge, Ravenswood Park, Ravenswood Art Gallery and Ravenswood Publishing and Broadcasting Company, the good old RPBC.”
    The mention of the name Ravenswood—a name that seems to come out of a novel—set my mind going back over the associations it began rattling in my head. Ever since I could read, I’d seen the name printed in bold-face type under the reduced logo of the Beacon at the top ofthe editorial page. When the issues were serious enough, the name Harlan Ravenswood appeared at the bottom of an editorial. Once, on the front page. More recently, the Ravenswood name was kept out of the paper. I used to think it was reverse snobbery: let the parvenus try to get their names into the social notes; those who had arrived kept their doings to themselves. Still, I knew who they were. Old Harlan had been dead now for many years, but I remember seeing his tall white-headed figure crossing St. Andrew Street, waving to friends, like a politician with an election coming up. I’d once stood beside him in a crowd lined up to watch a parade. I can’t remember the occasion, except that there were tears in his eyes when he turned away and the crowd began to disperse.
    I first saw his widow, Gladys, in this lobby. We’d been rehearsing a play in the basement of the TV building on Oak Hill, and she